Word Origins

10 Interesting Facts about Modern Words

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Ten surprising stories and histories surrounding the language of the modern world

This week we’ve been reading, and thoroughly enjoying, a review copy of Caroline Taggart’s book New Words for Old: Recycling Our Language for the Modern World. The book takes a look at supposedly ‘modern’ or contemporary words and examines their histories, revealing how they are often reworkings of older words which originally had different meanings. (This is something we particularly enjoy, as exemplified by our previous facts about modern words that originated in literature, which casts an appraising eye over such ‘recent’ formations as ‘selfie’ and ‘twerk’.) So Taggart’s book, which is out next week, is on a subject close to our hearts, and had a fair bit to teach us about word origins. Here are our ten favourite things which we learnt from New Words for Old.

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A Short History of the Word ‘Serendipity’

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The curious origins behind one of Britain’s favourite words – and its link to Gothic fiction Word origins, as demonstrated by the popularity of bestselling books like Mark Forsyth’s The Etymologicon: A Circular Stroll Through the Hidden Connections of the English Language, make fascinating reading. But ‘serendipity’ has a particularly interesting origin-story. The word ‘serendipity’ was invented on … Read more